Lunatic Gospel, part 1

17072009

About a year ago, I started a blog to track my journey of reading through the entire Bible, all the way from Genesis to Revelation. The project was called “The Lunatic Gospel” (explanation below). My intentions started out great: I read, I questioned, I blogged … for about two or three days in a row. Then there were gaps: first a few days, then a few weeks; then, months went by without a new post. It wasn’t that I never picked up my Bible, but blogging about it took more energy than I usually had to spare by the end of the day.

I’m discontinuing the old blog, but not the intent of the project; instead, I’ll continue my quest through the Bible in this forum every week or so: kind of like a disjointed mini-series. The Lunatic Gospel posts will simply be mixed in among the other writing, music, and art that this site has to offer.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus is the Son of God. He is the Christ: the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings. But I think it’s equally possible that, at least by human standards, he was probably a little bit off his rocker. And that’s okay with me. If it made perfect sense all the time, it wouldn’t be worth it.

I want to reclaim the lunacy of this gospel: this strange and wondrous book that has turned human society on its head over the course of many, many centuries. I want to embrace its contradictions and its paradoxes, its extremism and its haunting beauty. I want to read it with fresh eyes and just see where it goes, without falling back on preconceived Sunday-School answers as the neat conclusions to each chapter.

And maybe…just maybe…I can even reclaim that little bit of a lunatic that exists in me.